Augustsson, Lovisa

Abstract [en]

We encounter images and visual expressions on a daily basis. An image says more than a thousand words... but maybe the images can say too much? The school plays an important role in the development of democracy, gender equality, tolerance and respect of human rights. It is therefore important to have a discussion about the content of the textbooks and reflecting upon how these support the school's duty. I intend to investigate how images are produced in teaching materials for religious education, focusing on Christianity and Islam. The method of the essay is a semiotic content analysis. To reach the purpose, to investigate how and what images depicted in the teaching materials for religious education, four questions have been compiled: How does the image material look? What relationship does image and text have with each other, and how do they communicate? What is the balance between men and women? Are these different depending on the subject area? Do the textbooks show stereotypes or generalizing views through pictures? The result of the study shows that the analyzed textbooks have a relatively rich image content. Both books have religious phenomena as the main motive of the pictures. One of my most important issues in this analysis was whether the images had a reasonable caption or text link in the current text. Only 8% of the analyzed material had no caption or text attachment. The result also shows that both textbooks reinforce stereotypes. In Christianity, it became clear that 55% of the imagery shows stereotypical patterns, and in the texts about Islam, 60% show stereotypical patterns. A general view is that images contribute to learning and can help explain and illustrate a difficult subject. In particular, images are good for creating variation from the text, but using images must be done with care and caution, as images can easily contribute and reinforce stereotypic perceptions and prejudices.